The trouble with cliches is not just their inanity but also their incompatibility. In the Test series against India it is impossible for England to take it one game at a time and keep their eye on the prize without doing serious damage to the collective retina. If the former is a default setting, a rare example of myopia being a good thing, then the latter must be increasingly irresistible. The prize is to be recognised as officially the best team in the world and England may be only three games away.

If England beat India by two Tests or more, they will go top of the ICC Test Championship. This much we know. Yet the gravity of that potential achievement is only starting to sink in. There is a sense that, as with the 2005 Ashes, the series may be about to consume the country in a way none of us could have envisaged. For a nation so comfortable looking down at others, England spends remarkably little time on top. The rugby team were No1 for much of 2003 and 2004 but not since. The footballers have never been in the top three since Fifa introduced world rankings in 1993.

The ICC Test Championship was created by David Kendix and began in 2003, superseding the Wisden World Championship that had been introduced by Matthew Engel in 1996. Engel's plan was to give greater context to all future matches; the Test Championship has also served to give greater significance to the past. When Kendix backdated the table he found that England had led only three times since the second world war: from 1955-59, 1970-73 and 1979-80. If you get an MBE for 16 years, as England's players did when they ended the Ashes drought in 2005, what do you get for 31?

Or even 38. Although they had Ian Botham at his most superheroic, England's spell at the top between February 1979 and August 1980 is accompanied by a big asterisk: it came in the twilight zone of Test cricket, when many of the world's best were playing in Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket.

"Since this was based on results over the previous three to four years, it was heavily influenced by the Packer period," Kendix says. "Clearly this distorted Test results significantly and so I would hardly assert that England really had the No1 team at that time. My personal view is that, if England do manage to secure a two-Test winning margin against India, it will be nearly 40 years since they could legitimately claim to be the top Test side."

Even then it took South Africa's suspension from Test cricket in 1970 for England to reach top spot. The previous winter South Africa had brutalised Australia in a way that no team – not even England last winter – have managed. They would surely have led the table for much of the decade.

That should not detract, though, from a formidable England side. Led masterfully by Ray Illingworth, who was pushing 40, they were the kind of grizzled, gnarled yet also eccentric collective that would have looked at home in a 1970s cop show. They went 26 Tests unbeaten between 1968 and 1971, one short of West Indies' all-time record, and held top spot until an emergent and frighteningly hirsute Australian side shoved them aside in 1973.

Illingworth's side had won 2-0 in Australia in 1970-71 and it is no coincidence that the three England teams to have topped the table all returned triumphant from a tour of Australia. You cannot crack the world unless you have cracked Australia.

Len Hutton's England side went top of the Test Championship on the day they retained the Ashes in March 1955, a tour best remembered for Frank Tyson's unique combination of paint-stripping pace and Wordsworth-based sledging. England led the Test Championship for the entire four-year cycle until they were spanked 4-0 in Australia in 1958-59.

The side that regained the Ashes in 1953 is often regarded as the greatest in England's history – they were not top of the table, a result of Australia's residual invincibility – although the team that regained the Ashes 18 months later runs them seriously close: Hutton, Bill Edrich, Peter May, Colin Cowdrey, Denis Compton, Trevor Bailey, Godfrey Evans, Johnny Wardle, Tyson, Brian Statham and Bob Appleyard.

That team falls short of the two great modern sides, West Indies and Australia. West Indies were top for almost all of the 1980s – although Imran Khan's anarchic, underrated Pakistan side, who drew three consecutive series with West Indies while others were succumbing to chin music, did receive brief recognition when they went top for a solitary month, in August 1988. It is the only time Pakistan have ever led the ICC Test Championship.

Australia were leaders from 1995-99 and then, after a short spell of South African supremacy, 2001-09. They established the biggest ever lead of 34 points after taking the 2005 Ashes defeat out on the rest of the world with vigilante brutality.

England were never in serious contention to go top even after 2005, such was Australia's overall lead. This time they have the chance to beat the best team in the world and overtake them. If they manage that, being over the moon will be a dream come true, and to hell with whether the cliches are compatible.